Topics in Learning Sciences (351-0-21)
Topic
Computing, Ethics, and Society
Instructors
Natalie Melo
Meeting Info
Online: Tues, Thurs 9:30AM - 10:50AM
Overview of class
Computing technologies shape our personal, social, and political lives in increasingly complex and consequential ways - providing tremendous benefits (e.g. convenient access to information, connecting to one another across time and space) and harms (e.g. biased decision-making, mass surveillance, disinformation campaigns, and exclusion from critical material opportunities) that are important to examine and understand.
At the same time, these technologies are born and shaped by the societies in which they are developed. Thus, grappling with the ethics of technologies (i.e considering the harms and benefits, how and why they were created in the first place, and how and to what ends they are used) is important not only for ultimately creating more moral technologies but a more moral society. Thus, our approach to the ethics of computing technologies requires a multifaceted assessment of their harm and benefit to our individual, cultural, and political lives, and simultaneously a critical examination of the values, ideologies, and contexts through which computing technologies emerge.
To accomplish this, we will engage in critical reading across a range of topics drawn from computer science and HCI, education and learning sciences, as well as ethics and philosophy. These readings and ideas will help us to:
--Recognize the value judgements and subjectivities that undergird a wide variety of technical practices (e.g. sampling, data collection practices, categorization and classification, prediction, system design, etc.).
Examine the design choices and tradeoffs that various computing infrastructures make (and have made) in relation to important societal values (e.g. individual autonomy, free speech, equity, privacy, justice, security, access to opportunity, etc.).
--Consider some of the intended and unintended consequences of computing applications within our communities, institutions, and social systems (e.g. schooling, employment, policing, transportation, business, etc.). This involves paying attention to who wins and who loses, as well as how these technologies might amplify existing marginalities and privileges.
--Develop a variety of analytic lenses for examining computing technologies in terms of their social, ethical, and political consequences.
Registration Requirements
Instructor permission - Application: https://forms.gle/tv477Bj73UhSeYkcA
Evaluation Method
Readings and in-class discussions.
In-class activities to help students to consider the potential impacts of different kinds of technologies and design decisions.
Reflective writing assignments that will ask you to analyze the social and ethical dimensions of contemporary technology debates.